fashion of speculators who had cornered the market.
Béjard, the slave-dealer, and Saint-Fardier, the Pasha organized, in the multicolored little salons of Madame Schmidt, especially in the red room, celebrated for its Boule bed with groove and sliding piece, a true state bed, orgies in which both Phoenician pranks and Roman exuberance were resuscitated.
On these occasions Dupoissy, the jack-of-all-trades, fulfilled the platonic functions of manager. It was he who conferred with Madame Adele, the housekeeper, prepared the program and paid the bill. While the ever headier allegories of these "masques," worthy of a Ben Jonson struck with satyriasis, unrolled, the smooth factotum sat at the piano and strummed circus jigs. At each pause the actresses, nude or clad in long stockings and black velvet masks, begged the approbation of their disordered masters, and, crouching like kittens, rubbed their moist and rice-powdered flesh against the funereal dress-suits.
Such was the bewildering renown of these brothels that, during the days of carnival, the chaste wives of regular customers came masked to these diligent hives—during free hours, let it be said—and, escorted by the patron and the patronne, inspected the delicately tufted little cells, gilded like reliquaries, the beds contrived, even to the erotic pictures, to fold up like altar pieces.
And, were one to believe the scandal spread by their little friends, the Mesdames Saint-Fardier had not been the last to put the docility and amiability of their husbands to so extravagant a test.
At the Riet-Dijk the interloping compounds produced by the gamy civilization of New Carthage afforded him pessimistic subjects for observation. After
